Blood Bowl - the video game!
I learned about this game a couple of years ago, and have been anxiously awaiting its release ever since. Technically, it’s not out yet - it’ll hit the store shelves in a few months. BUT you can buy a down-loadable version right now from Cyanide’s website. As is usual for new games these days, it’ll cost yah 50 bones, sucks, but at least it’s cheaper than the physical board game from Games Workshop - 82.50!? What the hell is happening to this world…
Anyways, as most of you know, I’m a HUGE Blood Bowl fan. I consider Blood Bowl to be an example of a “perfect” board game. Its got it all - the rule set is solid as a rock, your players gain experience and get better as they play, and the theme is awesome - I mean how can you go wrong when you mix football, fantasy races, and dark humor? In my opinion its one of the most tactically heavy games one can play.
However, to really get the most out of Blood Bowl, you need to have a group of dedicated players to form a league. And anyone who has tried this knows that it’s damn difficult. People get busy or uninterested, games start getting missed, and before you know it the whole damn thing falls apart.
This was really the main reason I took such interest in the new video game version of my beloved Blood Bowl. Aside from all the pretty graphics - and the game certainly delivers in that department, the video game adaptation of Blood Bowl delivers a faithful recreation of Blood Bowl that can be played against anyone in the world via online matches.
The video game is worth every penny in my opinion, though I cannot imagine anyone who is not familiar with the board game being happy with it. While the rules and in-game tutorials are included - I don’t think the average video game player will be happy with having to learn all the ins-and-outs of a relatively complex board game. However, if you are familiar with it, you’ll be able to open the game and get to playing straight away - it’s extremely user friendly for veterans of the board game. There’s also a “Blitz Mode” in which players can play in real time. While this may be more interesting to video game players, I can’t comment on it because I really have little interest in it, and have yet to try it out.
The games A.I. is a little on the slow side, so the single player mode is a bit easy - I have yet to loose a game with my single player chaos team. So online play with other human players is where it’s at. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with people dropping out of games when they start to loose - Cyanide is currently looking into ways to dissuade people from doing this, so hopefully people doing this sort of thing will become less frequent.
Currently, the rules are faithful to the current living rulebook (LRB5.0), and as of now, you can choose from 8 different teams - chaos, dwarves, goblins, humans, lizardmen, orcs, skaven, and wood elves. Nearly everything you can buy in the board game for your team is available in the video game - some notable exceptions are the goblin bombardier, team wizards, and assistant coaches which are oddly absent - though they may be added in a future patch. All of your favorite star players are here - with more being added all the time - Morg N Thorg for example was added to my game via download shortly after I downloaded it. Additional teams are also planned for release, the next two being the dark elves and undead.
Since I downloaded it, I’ve played a bunch of Blood Bowl matches with my chaos team, “Khorne’s Killers”. Matches require much less time than their physical counterparts - you can finish a match in about a half hour, though online matches can take much longer.
My personal opinion is that Blood Bowl the video game is a great value - though I can easily understand why non-fans would feel that the game simply isn’t worth the price tag. So my final verdict: Buy it if you love the board game, you won’t regret it - skip it if you don’t.
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DEACON
